My Life Among the Serial Killers: Inside the Minds of the World's Most Notorious Murderers - Softcover

Morrison, Dr. Helen; Goldberg, Harold

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060524081 ISBN 13: 9780060524081

Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2005

Synopsis

Over the course of twenty-five years, Dr. Helen Morrison has profiled more than eighty serial killers around the world. What she learned about them will shatter every assumption you've ever had about the most notorious criminals known to man.Judging by appearances, Dr. Helen Morrison has an ordinary life in the suburbs of a major city. She has a physician husband, two children, and a thriving psychiatric clinic. But her life is much more than that. She is one of the country's leading experts on serial killers, and has spent as many as four hundred hours alone in a room with depraved murderers, digging deep into killers' psyches in ways no profiler before ever has.

In My Life Among the Serial Killers, Dr. Morrison relates how she profiled the Mad Biter, Richard Otto Macek, who chewed on his victims' body parts, stalked Dr. Morrison, then believed she was his wife. She did the last interview with Ed Gein, who was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. John Wayne Gacy, the clown-obsessed killer of young men, sent her crazed Christmas cards and gave her his paintings as presents. Then there was Atlanta child killer Wayne Williams; rapist turned murderer Bobby Joe Long; England's Fred and Rosemary West, who killed girls and women in their "House of Horrors"; and Brazil's deadliest killer of children, Marcelo Costa de Andrade.

Dr. Morrison has received hundreds of letters from killers, read their diaries and journals, evaluated crime scenes, testified at their trials, and studied photos of the gruesome carnage. She has interviewed the families of the victims -- and the spouses and parents of the killers -- to gain a deeper understanding of the killer's environment and the public persona he adopts. She has also studied serial killers throughout history and shows how this is not a recent phenomenon with psychological autopsies of the fifteenth-century French war hero Gilles de Rais, the sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess Bathory, H. H. Holmes of the late ninteenth century, and Albert Fish of the Roaring Twenties.

Through it all, Dr. Morrison has been on a mission to discover the reasons why serial killers are compelled to murder, how they choose their victims, and what we can do to prevent their crimes in the future. Her provocative conclusions will stun you.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Judging by appearances, Dr. Helen Morrison has an ordinary life in the suburbs of a major city. She has a physician husband, two children, and a thriving psychiatric clinic. But her life is more than that. She is one of the world's leading experts on serial killers, and has spent as many as four hundred hours alone in rooms with depraved murderers, digging deep into killers' psyches in ways no profiler ever has before.

In My Life among the Serial Killers, Dr. Morrison relates how she profiled the Mad Biter, Richard Otto Macek, who chewed on his victims' body parts, stalked Dr. Morrison, then believed she was his wife. She did the last interview with Ed Gein, who was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. John Wayne Gacy, the clown-obsessed killer of young men, sent her crazed Christmas cards and gave her his paintings as presents. Then there was Atlanta child killer Wayne Williams; rapist turned murderer Bobby Joe Long; Fred and Rosemary West, who killed girls and women in their Gloucester "House of Horrors"; and Brazil's deadliest killer of children, Marcelo Costa de Andrade.

Dr. Morrison has received hundreds of letters from killers, read their diaries and journals, evaluated crime scenes, testified at their trials, and studied photos of the gruesome carnage. She has interviewed the families of the victims - and the spouses and parents of the killers - to gain a deeper understanding of the killer's environment and the public persona they adopt. She has also studied serial killers throughout history and shows how this is not a recent phenomenon with psychological autopsies of the fifteenth-century French war hero Gilles de Rais, the sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess Bathory, H.H. Holmes of the late ninetheenth-century, and Albert Fish of the Roaring Twenties.

Through it all, Dr. Morrison's goal has been to discover the reasons serial killers are compelled to murder, how they choose their victims, and what we can do to prevent their crimes in the future. Her provocative conclusions will stun you.

From the Back Cover:

‘Morrison’s ultimate quest is to build a firm body of evidence which establishes why serial killers kill.’ The Times

‘the pioneer profiler of serial murderers.’ Irish Independent

To judge by appearances Helen Morrison has a very ordinary life, but behind the façade her life is as dangerous as it is fascinating. Dr Morrison is one of the world’s leading experts on serial killers, and has spent over four hundred hours alone in rooms with depraved murderers, digging deep into killers’ psyches in ways no profiler has ever done before. What she has learned about them will shatter every assumption you’ve ever had about the most notorious criminals known to man.

In My Life Among the Serial Killers, Dr. Morrison tell of her encounters with, amongst others,

• Rosemary West, who helped Fred West kill girls and women in their Gloucester “House of Horrors”
• Richard Otto Macek, ‘The Mad Biter’, who chewed on his victims’ body parts.
• Ed Gem, the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
• John Wayne Gacy, the clown-obsessed killer of young men.
• Atlanta child killer Wayne Williams
• Bobby Joe Long, the ‘Classified Ad Murderer’.
• Brazil’s deadliest child murderer, Marcelo Costa de Andrade.

Dr. Morrison has received hundreds of letters from killers, read their diaries, evaluated crime scenes, interviewed the families of the victims as well as the spouses and parents of the killers to gain a deeper understanding of the killer’s persona. She has also studied the problem historically by conducting psychological autopsies on some of histories most notorious killers all to discover the reasons why serial killers are compelled to murder, how they choose their victims, and what we can do to prevent their crimes in the future.

Her provocative conclusions will stun you.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0060524081
• ISBN 13: 9780060524081
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 304